Obama's Ongoing Friendship with the Muslim Brotherhood

Michael L.

{Cross-Posted at the Elder of Ziyon and Jews Down Under.}

In a recent piece entitled, The Pathos of Jewish anti-Zionism, I referenced Obama administration support for the Muslim Brotherhood and wondered aloud how any Jewish person could possibly stand behind a president of the United States that offered moral, military, and financial support to an organization devoted to a genocidally anti-Semitic worldview and the restoration of the Caliphate?

The truth of the matter is that Jewish support for Barack Obama, given Obama's callous indifference toward anti-Semitism and support for the Muslim Brotherhood, is perhaps the greatest failure of American Jewry in many decades.  I have been considering how this happened for a number of years and have come to the conclusion that many American Jewish supporters of Barack Obama simply refuse to acknowledge Obama's support for the Brotherhood as support for the Brotherhood.

Just as Jewish Obama supporters do not care about his indifference toward rising levels of violent Muslim immigrant anti-Semitism in Europe, so they do not care about his support for the rise of political Islam, which he refuses to even so much as name.

This is, in my view, a dangerous failure to acknowledge that which is obvious, but I am very much hoping that there is now sufficient evidence wherein the obvious simply becomes undeniable.

Khaled Abu Toameh has an article for the Gatestone Institute entitled, U.S. Seen in Middle East as Ally of Terrorists.  In this article he argues that given Obama's support for the Muslim Brotherhood many Egyptians see the administration as an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood.

{Shocking, I know.}

He writes:

While the Egyptian government has been waging war on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic radical groups, the U.S. Administration and some Europeans are continuing to hamper efforts to combat terrorism.

Many Egyptians and moderate Arabs and Muslims were shocked to hear that the U.S. State Department recently hosted a Muslim Brotherhood delegation.

And, indeed, the U.S. State Department did, in fact, recently host a Muslim Brotherhood delegation thereby incurring the anger of the Egyptian government, but given Obama's disrespect for allies - and dislike of Israel - this is hardly surprising.

Lori Lowenthal Marcus, writing in the Jewish Press tells us:

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shokry said the explanation given by the State Department for meeting with former Muslim Brotherhood party leaders was “not understandable.”

Shoukry was responding to U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki’s statements during the daily briefing that a meeting by the delegation of former Freedom and Justice Party (Muslim Brotherhood’s political party) members with U.S. State department officials, arranged and paid for by Georgetown University was “routine.” 

The primary acts of Obama administration support for the Brotherhood consist of such "routine" recognitions.  By hosting the Brotherhood, they recognize it and thus legitimize it.   It is hard to imagine that anyone would think that when Obama administration officials legitimize an Islamist organization this somehow does not constitute support for that organization and, therefore, political Islam, more generally.

According to Toameh, a number of Egyptian columnists, along with the Egyptian government, have been highly vocal in their condemnation of Obama administration support for the Brotherhood.  One of these is Mohamed Salmawi.  Toameh writes:

"The U.S. Administration says it is combating these groups at home while it is supporting them abroad," Salmawi wrote. "This meeting has grave indications because it shows that Washington has not abandoned its policy of double standards toward Islamic terrorism.

Salmawi also took issue with the U.S. Administration for turning a blind eye to the hypocrisy and double talk of the Muslim Brotherhood. "One of the leaders of Muslim Brotherhood, for example, told the world that he welcomes the Jews of Israel," he added. "But this same leader announced in front of the Egyptian people that they should march in the millions to liberate Jerusalem from the occupation of the Jews. [Ousted President] Mohamed Morsi, before his election, described these Jews as descendants of apes and pigs. In English, the Muslim Brotherhood says one thing and in Arabic something completely different."

So, yes, the Obama administration does, in fact, support the Muslim Brotherhood despite the fact that the Brotherhood has called for the conquest of Jerusalem and, yet, American Jews still backed Barack Obama by about 70 percent in the last election.

The public legitimization of the Brotherhood, which Obama initially undertook during the famous (or infamous) 2009 Cairo speech, was perhaps the first public example of this "routine" legitimization.  Despite the wishes of former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, the Obama administration insisted upon Muslim Brotherhood attendance.  This suggested that political Islam is, for Barack Obama, a legitimate political movement in need of courting and cooperation.

The Brotherhood came to power in Egypt with the significant assistance of the Obama administration.  Obama demanded that Mubarak step down knowing full well that the Brotherhood was waiting in the wings.  When the Brotherhood came to power in a fraudulent election wherein Christians were sometimes prevented from voting at the point of a rifle, Obama still sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Cairo to ensure a smooth transition to an Islamist government.  Then, once in power, the Obama administration supplied this heinous genocidal regime with both financial assistance and heavy weaponry.

Our friend Alexi, however, has the raised the distinction between supporting a country and supporting a particular regime.  This is an important distinction to address and Alexi was absolutely right to raise the question.  The fact of the matter is that when Obama sent cash and Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter jets to Egypt he was giving that cash and weaponry to a regime that called for the conquest of Jerusalem.  It was the Brotherhood, not the Egyptian people, that received and then allocated these resources.  Those resources did not in any real way represent support for the Egyptian people, but were a means of bolstering the strength and prestige of the Islamist regime in Cairo.

Some people might argue that none of this was meant as support for the Brotherhood, per se, but actually represented support for the democratic forces sweeping the Middle East during the joyous Arab Spring.

The problem is that there were no democratic forces sweeping the Middle East during the misnamed "Arab Spring," unless you think of democracy as consisting of one man, one vote, one time.  Supporting democracy by supporting the Brotherhood would be akin to supporting democracy by supporting Adolph Hitler. The Brotherhood has an exceedingly long track record of terrorism and Jew hatred.  One of the founders of the organization, Sayid Qutb, even wrote a little book entitled, "Our Struggle with the Jews" which Richard Cohen describes in the Washington Post as "a work of unabashed, breathtakingly stupid anti-Semitism, one of the reasons the New York Review of Books recently characterized Qutb's views 'as extreme as Hitler's.'"

And, in fact, the Brotherhood supported the Nazis during World War II and gave refuge for many of them afterward, including the brutal Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who spent much of the war years as a guest of the German government in Berlin.

The real problem here is that Obama's Middle East policy, and particularly his policy toward political Islam, is entirely incoherent.  Obama seems to think that he can pick and choose which Islamists to support, which to ignore, and which to oppose, all based strictly on political considerations.

So, for example, Obama opposes al-Qaeda, but Obama had to oppose al-Qaeda due to the fact of 9/11.

The Brotherhood, as is well-known, however, is the parent organization of both al-Qaeda and Hamas, yet Obama certainly does not oppose the Brotherhood.  This, needless to say, raises the obvious question, how can one oppose a political organization with a revolting ideology, like al-Qaeda, while supporting its parent organization that holds to essentially the identical ideology?

The reason for this is because Obama is not in opposition to political Islam.

In fact, he cannot even bring himself to breathe the words "political Islam" or "radical Islam" or "Islamism," thus demonstrating political cowardice in the face of a real threat.

Finally, one cannot defeat an enemy without defining it, naming it, understanding it, and gaining public support for the effort.

This Obama refuses to do.

So many years after 9/11 - and as we see the spread of political Islam along with the attendant head-chopping, the genocide of minorities like the Yazidi, the burying of children alive, the burning of caged human beings doused with gasoline, and other such interesting examples of al-Sharia jurisprudence - one must wonder why?

Why is this president shielding political Islam from its richly deserved comeuppance and why did he tell us that the rise of this vile movement was something akin to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s?

Standing before the United Nations on May 19. 2011, Obama said this:

There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat.

If Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive to hear those words, he would never stop retching.

I know I haven't.

On randomness

Sar Shalom

There has been much written about Obama's use of the word "random" to describe the attack on the Hyper Cacher supermarket outside Paris, and his spokespersons' defense of that characterization. While asserting that the Hyper Cacher is not a manifestation of Jew-hatred is clearly a major offense, it would be worth taking a look at what the word "random" means before asserting that that is the meaning of the word in this particular instance.

It would be helpful to illustrate the possible meanings with some hypothetical examples. Suppose Hamas were to launch a salvo of rockets going north-northeast from Gaza in a manner that they could land in Qalqiliya as easily as they could land in Petach Tikva. Now suppose Hamas put controls on the guidance systems to make sure that they land in Petach Tikva and not in Qalqiliya. Now suppose that Hamas instead of launching rockets north-northeast from Gaza were to launch mortars at an IDF convoy preparing to invade Gaza. Which if any of those scenarios are "random?" For two of the three, the answer is unambiguous. If Hamas were to be unconcerned whether the rockets landed in Petach Tikva or Qalqiliya, it would be a completely random act and a mortar attack on an invading convoy is clearly not a random act. However, the rocket attack at Petach Tikva sparing Qalqiliya has a random element and a non-random element. I would maintain that the randomness of the indiscriminate attack on Israeli nationals would be more significant than the efforts to spare Qalqiliya. Furthermore, it is this randomness that would contribute to making such an attack a war crime.

Returning to Hyper Cacher, while the attack was discriminating in its target among Frenchmen, it was not discriminating in its target among Jews. An example of a discriminating target among Jews would be an office of the Hebron Fund, a group that promotes activities that the Very Serious People of the world arrogantly say "legitimately" grieves the Arab world. By selecting the non-discriminating target, the attackers introduced some degree of randomness to their act, and that randomness exacerbates their crime.

The above description only states a possible meaning for Obama's use of the word "random." From just the speech in which he used that term, one could not tell whether the meaning was that the attackers intended to kill Jews and didn't care anything else about the victims or that they attacked a random supermarket that happened to be kosher. Obama does have a record of being blasé about Islamic radicalism, a record that would induce people to leap at the second meaning. However, before the speech in which he described the act as "random," he did describe it as anti-semitic, which would mean either he was retracting his initial statement or he intended the first meaning. If that was his intent, it was not the first time he made this type of gaffe.

Random, Arbitrary, and Completely Indiscriminate

Michael L.

“We note the worrisome trend of people associating violence by people of the Muslim faith with violence by people of the Muslim faith." - Preoccupied Territory

Random acts of violence have plagued Europe recently, but no one seems sure who might be behind this violence or why they are committing these acts.

We know that the perpetrators - presuming there actually are perpetrators - are human beings.

We know that these human beings attack other human beings, but we have no idea why.

The one thing that we do know is that none of this has anything to do with any particular religious faiths, neither in terms of the victims, nor in terms of the perpetrators.

As president Obama said, "No religion condones the killing of innocents."

A Big Tip O The Kippa to Ian at the EOZ.

Palestinian Authority Condemns Chapel Hill Terrorism, Calls for Role in Investigation

Michael L.

The Jerusalem Post tells us:

The Palestinian Authority on Saturday condemned as "terrorism" the killings of three young Palestinian-Americans in North Carolina and called on US authorities to include its investigators in the probe.

Branding Hicks "an American extremist and hateful racist," the Palestinian Foreign Ministry said the incident suggested a rise in dangerous discrimination against American Muslims.

"We consider it a serious indication of the growth of racism and religious extremism which is a direct threat to the lives of hundreds of thousands of American citizens who follow the Islamic faith," the ministry said in a statement.

It called for "a serious investigation and the involvement of Palestinian investigators to clarify the circumstances of these assassinations and premeditated murders" in Chapel Hill.

I had no idea that the victims were of Israeli or Jordanian Arab descent.

It's interesting that after the Jihadi attack at the Boston Marathon, Obama said that we must not rush to judgment nor leap to conclusions about the nature of this violence.  And, of course, after Nidal Hasan slaughtered thirteen soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, while screaming "Alahu Akbar" the Obama administration referred to it as "work place violence."

And, needless to say, Obama recently suggested that the Islamist slaughter of 4 Jews at the Parisian kosher market was a random act of violence, thereby veiling the anti-Semitic nature of the attack.  It is in order to create obscurity that Obama refers to Islamist violence as "violent extremism."

However, after this shooting, with no meaningful evidence that the victims were killed for either their faith or ethnicity, Obama tells us:

No one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship.

Obama's sympathies depend upon who the victims are and who the perpetrators are.

Obama is, thus, a racist.

He clearly prefers and respects some ethnic and religious groups over others.

Obama Runs Cover for anti-Semitism

Michael L.

Polls consistently show that Arab and Muslim societies absolutely seethe with violent hatred toward Jews.

Such hatred is traditional, long-standing over many centuries, and theologically-based in such a manner as to turn the Jewish people into a Cosmic Evil in the minds of many practitioners of the Muslim faith.  It is not merely that Jews are evil, but that evil is, itself, Jewish.

Such poisonous notions are particularly popular within Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

President Obama, however, seems entirely indifferent to genocidal Islamist anti-Semitism, which is why he called the Islamist attack against Jews in the kosher market in Paris "random."  In this way he obscures the Jew hatred that resides at the heart of political Islam, rendering the attack as hardly more meaningful then your garden variety mugging.  In Obama's universe, or so it seems, it was not as if the Islamist murderers, as Muslims, killed those Jews, as Jews.  No.  It was just a random act of violence by no one in particular, toward no one in particular.  The fact that, in truth, the kosher market was chosen precisely because it would likely have Jews in it - because it was an anti-Semitic attack - is veiled by Obama's refusal to acknowledge the Islamist nature of the attack and by his enthusiasm for whitewashing its anti-Semitic nature.

Now, even as we are still struggling to know just what to make of Obama's disrespect of the Jewish people, the administration gives us yet another slap in the head.  In the White House's Joint Resolution before Congress requesting limited war authorization there is a recognition that the Islamic State represents a threat to various groups in the region.

These include Muslims who are, in fact, the number one victims of Islamists.  These include Christians who are being threatened.  These include, to use the old fashioned term found in the document, "Turkmen" as well as the Yezidis.  These include women and Americans.

So, according to the Obama administration, the Islamic State is a threat to pretty much everyone, except for the Jews.  If you add up Christians and Muslims and women, then you are easily looking at something well over the majority of the world's population.  According to the Obama administration all those people are under a direct threat from the Islamic State, but somehow genocidal Jew hatred simply doesn't make the cut.

Why is that?... one wonders to oneself aloud.

The resolution reads, in part:

Whereas ISIL leaders have stated that they intend to conduct terrorist attacks internationally, including against the United States, its citizens, and interests;

Whereas ISIL has committed despicable acts of violence and mass executions against Muslims, regardless of sect, who do not subscribe to ISIL’s depraved, violent, and oppressive ideology;

Whereas ISIL has threatened genocide and committed vicious acts of violence against religious and ethnic minority groups, including Iraqi Christian, Yezidi, and Turkmen populations;

Whereas ISIL has targeted innocent women and girls with horrific acts of violence, including abduction, enslavement, torture, rape, and forced marriage; 

How about something like:

Whereas ISIL is determined to overthrow the Jewish state of Israel, thereby leaving the Jewish population without autonomy or a means of self-defense; 

But, nope.

Because Obama not only refuses to acknowledge the rise of political Islam as an anti-Semitic political movement, he consequently obscures the nature of that movement and therefore leaves the Jewish people off of the list of those threatened by "ISIL."

Even, by the way, the use of such an acronym by the administration serves to hide the Islamist nature of the organization.  Instead of calling the Islamic State, the Islamic State, the administration uses a flat term that connotates nothing.

The bottom line is that Barack Obama is entirely indifferent to the well-being of the Jewish people and of the Jewish state of Israel.

By pretending that anti-Semitism is virtually non-existent, he provides cover for those who seek to harm Jews, whether in the Middle East or in Paris or anywhere else.

This is presumably not Obama's intention.  It is merely his effect.

However, in order to be fair, it is likely the case that if the Obama administration had included the Jewish people many would have claimed that the United States is going to war for the Jews, but some tend to claim that anyways.